Quote Originally Posted by readingr
Ron,

That is truly amazing

Would you mind sharing what product did you use PS,PSE,PSP?

Mouse or tablet and pen?

What tools were used to clone out the twig:

Not sure I understand the conversion to 16bit v 8bit editing and how that keeps the colour.

Roger
Thanks, Roger.

I used Corel Paint Shop Pro X, the mouse and the clone tool to take out the twig in front of the owl, a distracting piece of snow on the owl and a branch sticking out of his head so-to-speak and a couple of others. The difficulty was of course working with the pattern created by the feathers and I used the mouse and the brush tool to correct some minor problems.

If you edit in 8 bit like most and then go back to the histogram you will discover that you have lost colour information and are down from for example 256 colours to perhaps 230 or fewer depending on how much editing you have done. The result of this is loss of tones, rough as opposed to smooth transition between colours and sometimes even loss of detail in highlights or shadows. Each time you save in jpeg you also compress the range of colours too.

16 bit has roughly 5 times the number of colours to start off with and there is no loss of information when you save. Therefore quality-wise, it is certainly advantageous to do as much editing as possible in 16 bit and only move to 8 bit for perhaps an edit that cannot be done in 16bit format, and the final saving for the web.

Ronnoco